"Then let's hurry," she pleaded. "We have so little time."
"Why? What's the hurry?"
"The One! The One!" she burst out in sudden anxiety. "It'll come for us
any minute, don't you understand?"
"Okay, okay," soothed Pritchard. He and the others were smiling at
her excitement, when her equine suddenly reared so suddenly that she
tumbled off. They started to her assistance, but she landed light as a
cat on her feet. She stared wildly about her.
The equine uttered a growl and galloped off. The girl remained
crouched, her eyes darting in every direction.
"Now what?" said Pritchard.
"The One," she breathed. "It's somewhere near. My sextuped would never
have bolted like that otherwise."
"Oh, for Pete's sake," said Pritchard, taking her arm. "Come on--"
"Say, Mr. Pritchard, what's that thing over there?" Kemp pointed off to
his left.
"Oh, God, no...." Cornelia's voice was a quavering moan.
Pritchard glanced where the stocky lad was pointing. What appeared to
be an exceptionally tall and unusually red grass blade was wavering
gently, as if bending to a mild breeze, about fifty yards off.
"Hell," muttered Sturgis, "that face is familiar."
Pritchard started walking toward it, the others following him. "Let's
fan out a bit," he said, "until we see what this is."
"Come back, come back," came the girl's agonized whisper behind them.
"Don't go near...."
They ignored her. At a distance of ten yards Pritchard halted. They all
watched with consuming curiosity.
The slender red thing was growing. Or, rather, it was pouring out of
the ground, crumbs of dirt sticking to its glistening scarlet wetness,
its delicately tapering tip now some ten or twelve feet in the air.
Pritchard shifted the flamer tank on his shoulders and started to say,
"I think--", when a maned gorilla loping across the meadow some hundred
yards away gave a sudden scream and broke into a wild, shambling run
in the other direction. Another animal gave bellowing voice, and
another--and abruptly there was commotion, spreading over the island
toward the mountain.
Pritchard cleared his throat. "Get around it, boys. Let it keep coming,
but when I say the word give it a lick of fire."
The waving red spire stood some fifteen feet high now. As he
circled into his position with the others, he noticed two things
simultaneously. Another little scarlet tip was questing up through the
trampled grass close to the first one. And, out of the corner of his
eye he could see the animals that were Cornelia's people streaming
either way along the base of the mountain, in a frenzied rout to get to
the river on the other side.
Then Cornelia's hands were clenching his arm, her voice panting
hysterically in his ear. "Run, Pritchard! You don't know what you're up
against. Oh, believe me," she sobbed, "please, please, please believe
me. This is The One."
His eyes focusing on the growing scarlet tips--the second one had grown
almost as high as the first--Pritchard smiled indulgently. "We're going
to stay for the fun," he said. "What happened to all your friends?
Stampeded, didn't they?"
She opened her mouth to reply but her answer was cut off by Greene's
sudden scream.
Greene screamed as McManus had screamed last night. Screamed and sank
writhing to his knees. Some kind of frothing slime was running down
over his shoulders and chest, dissolving the acid-repellent cordron
jacket, running down over Greene from what had been his head.
From between the bases of the now thick, tall red tongues, another jet
of liquid squirted toward Sturgis. He leaped sideways and it missed him
clean. "Holy Damn!" he shouted.
Pritchard gripped the flamer's trigger. "Give it hell!" he roared.
* * * * *
Three streams of fire converged in a ball of flame on the twin red
spires. They disappeared in the rippling, booming fire.
"Hold it!" Pritchard shut off his flamer and the others followed suit.
Holding the nozzle before him, he walked to the place where the things
had been.
There was nothing there, except a hole where the tangled grass had been
disturbed, and a kind of pit in the ground, into which loose dirt was
still dribbling. He backed a step and turned the flamer on, playing
fire into the pit and around it. Then he shut it off.
"You fool," came the girl's voice at his elbow. "You damned fool. You
just won't believe me, will you?"
Pritchard lifted his gaze toward what had once been Cadet Greene.
Richard Harrison Greene, a rollicking lad from the Cumberland Gap.
Thomas Guilfoyle McManus, a man with a red-haired soul. McManus, first,
and, now, Greene. The hunter's face was turned to stone.
"Keep your eyes peeled," he said harshly to the others and stalked
off to the place where the squirt of liquid had landed after missing
Sturgis. Some thirty feet from where it had been ejected, there was no
grass but a four-foot smear where the ground bubbled and frothed. The
stench hovering over this spot was incredible, even to the man who had
encountered it before.
He turned to confront Cornelia who had followed him. "I don't know
whether I can get it through your thick head or not," she bit out,
"you've simply got to get out of here. You can't--"
"Get this through _your_ thick head, Miss Boyce," said Pritchard
between clenched teeth. "This thing, whatever it is, has killed two of
my men. I'm quite ready to believe it is intelligent, possibly the most
intelligent organism on this planet. But it's a killer just the same
and we're going to kill it. None of your idealistic theories are going
to stop us, either."
She stared at him, beginning to shake her head a little wildly. "You
can't kill it! That's what I'm trying to tell you. It can't be k--"
There was a sudden crash. Cornelia whirled and screamed. The three men
and the girl stood transfixed.
Over by the river one of the jet cruisers was on its side, resting on
a crumpled wing. The other was forty feet in the air, and rising, held
in the coil of an impossible red monstrosity rearing its long wet self
into the sky.
It was a worm, a very long, thin worm at least a hundred feet long, not
counting what remained underground. It towered some fifty feet into the
air, about thirty-five feet more of it wrapped around the cruiser. At
its tip two fifteen-feet-long feelers writhed and wriggled, as if still
smarting from the scorching they had received.
The coil slipped a little. The cruiser, looking more than ever like a
beetle at this moment, slid slowly out and fell. And again it crashed
into the cruiser on the ground and rolled ponderously off it.
"Good ... God!" came Sturgis's voice shakily at Pritchard's elbow. The
Chief Hunter was still too appalled to speak. He stared as the worm's
rope-like body came curving down out of the sky, down to the cruisers
again. Seeing how that red length alternately thinned to a one-foot
thickness and swelled again to three feet and more as it oozed around
the cruiser that had remained on the ground, he had a vision of how it
had entered the _Apollo_, shrinking itself to a mere six-inch thread
that poured through the intake port, seeping along the duct, swelling,
bulging at McManus's air-grill ... and coming out of the ground,
probably close to the ship, it had evaded the radar field.
Cornelia's agonized face swam before his eyes. He felt his body shaking
in the grip of her slender hands. Words--
"--fool, run! _Listen to me!_ It's busy smashing your ships. We have a
chance. Run--to the mountain! Oh, dear God...."
At first he was like a sleep-walker. They turned him around and pushed
him into a stumbling run, but his head turned back, his eyes large and
almost vacant on that scene by the river.
Then he was running. It was a good two hundred yards to the mountain,
but the grass was mashed to a springy tangle under their feet and they
had only to skirt the thickly-strewn bodies. The girl took the lead,
the men not far in the rear, the nozzles of their flamers flapping out
behind them.
A crash, followed by a dull roar, came to them. They shot quick glances
over their shoulders. The fuel tanks of one of the cruisers had let go
and fire was blooming from the now distant beetle. The worm was arching
wildly away, and then sinking in a curve to the ground.
"How fast--can it go--on the--surface?" panted Pritchard.
"Much faster--than under--ground!" Cornelia muttered.